Case Study: Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE) boosts productivity and cuts costs with Office 365

Consulting engineers’ professional body builds a more productive infrastructure in the cloud

The Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE) is a London‑based nonprofit that represents about 450 consulting and engineering firms across the UK. With a small IT team supporting roughly 35 staff split between office and mobile regional managers, ACE struggled with disparate devices and slow, latency-prone access to on‑premises data that hampered collaboration, delayed communications, and consumed IT time with reactive fixes.

ACE partnered with Cloud Direct to migrate to Microsoft 365—deploying SharePoint Online, Office apps, Dynamics CRM and Microsoft 365 Business with mobile app management—so staff can securely store, share and coauthor documents from anywhere. The move eliminated version‑control and connectivity issues, improved mobile security without overtaking personal devices, lowered operating costs by 25%, aided GDPR compliance, and freed the digital team to focus on strategic initiatives.

Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE)

Sebastian Ailioaie

Head of Digital